Florida Woman Wanted After Abduction Threat

A woman from Boca Raton, Fla., who in recent years has placed ads in the Forward imploring readers to pressure courts to return custody of her two children to her, is wanted by the police for nonpayment of child support and for improper contact after placing ads in a local newspaper seeking others to help her kidnap the kids.

Police have labeled Meryl Pearlman Shulman, a 45-year-old woman believed to live in New York City, a parental abduction risk. Shulman took out an ad in the November 23 edition of the Boca Raton News, threatening to snatch the children for a “glatt kosher holiday feast” in New York. In 2001, a Florida court ordered sole custody of the children, a 13-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, to the father, Mark Shulman, determining the mother to be mentally unstable and pathologically narcissistic.

The Boca Raton police have four arrest warrants for Shulman, stemming from a series of at least four advertisements threatening abduction and from a pattern of harassing phone calls to the father’s home, the children’s school and synagogue, and their classmates’ parents. Mark Shulman also claimed that his ex-wife has hired private detectives to follow him and the children and that she filed false police reports claiming he would kill her.

Her full-page ads claiming “A Fraud Has Been Perpetrated on the Courts” and quoting testimony from her then-8-year-old son ran twice in the Forward in 2001, and one time each in 2002 and 2003. The Forward refused her request to run an ad this year.